The Fugitive Blacksmith eBook

As the events of my life since that have been of a
public professional nature, I will say no more about
it. My object in writing this tract is now completed.
It has been to shew the reader the hand of God with
a slave; and to elicit your sympathy in behalf of
the fugitive slave, by shewing some of the untold
dangers and hardships through which he has to pass
to gain liberty, and how much he needs friends on free
soil; and that men who have felt the yoke of slavery,
even in its mildest form, cannot be expected to speak
of the system otherwise than in terms of the most
unqualified condemnation.

There is one sin that slavery committed against me,
which I never can forgive. It robbed me of my
education; the injury is irreparable; I feel the embarrassment
more seriously now than I ever did before. It
cost me two years’ hard labour, after I fled,
to unshackle my mind; it was three years before I
had purged my language of slavery’s idioms; it
was four years before I had thrown off the crouching
aspect of slavery; and now the evil that besets me
is a great lack of that general information, the foundation
of which is most effectually laid in that part of life
which I served as a slave. When I consider how
much now, more than ever, depends upon sound and thorough
education among coloured men, I am grievously overwhelmed
with a sense of my deficiency, and more especially
as I can never hope now to make it up. If I know
my own heart, I have no ambition but to serve the
cause of suffering humanity; all that I have desired
or sought, has been to make me more efficient for
good. So far I have some consciousness that I
have done my utmost; and should my future days be few
or many, I am reconciled to meet the last account,
hoping to be acquitted of any wilful neglect of duty;
but I shall have to go to my last account with this
charge against the system of slavery, “Vile
monster! thou hast hindered my usefulness, by robbing
me of my early education.”

Oh! what might I have been now, but for this robbery
perpetrated upon me as soon as I saw the light.
When the monster heard that a man child was born,
he laughed, and said, “It is mine.”
When I was laid in the cradle, he came and looked
on my face, and wrote down my name upon his barbarous
list of chattels personal, on the same list where he
registered his horses, hogs, cows, sheep, and even
his dogs! Gracious Heaven, is there no repentance
for the misguided men who do these things!

The only harm I wish to slaveholders is, that they
may be speedily delivered from the guilt of a sin,
which, if not repented of, must bring down the judgment
of Almighty God upon their devoted heads. The
least I desire for the slave is, that he may be speedily
released from the pain of drinking a cup whose bitterness
I have sufficiently tasted, to know that it is insufferable.

CHAPTER VI.

SOME ACCOUNT OF THE FAMILY I LEFT IN SLAVERY—­PROPOSAL TO PURCHASE MYSELF
AND PARENTS—­HOW MET BY MY OLD MASTER.